


Before Fury Road

by Florence_in_Silver



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Genre: Furiosa's backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-19 03:04:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13695567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Florence_in_Silver/pseuds/Florence_in_Silver
Summary: Before she was Imperator Furiosa, she was Furiosa of the Swaddle Dog Clan. This is the story of how our brave heroine came to the Citadel and became an Imperator for the wretched Immortan.





	Before Fury Road

**Author's Note:**

> I read the Furiosa comic (mistake) and it is absolute garbage. Everything good about the movie doesn't exist in the comic. Here's a good article breaking down why it is so shit if anyone is interested: https://www.themarysue.com/furiosa-comic-review/  
> So here's my take on Furiosa's backstory, which I think fits her character and the overall tone of the movie much better.  
> There's no explicit sexual assault in the story, but there is some implied stuff. And some violence, as well, hence the M rating.  
> I might expand this later to include backstories for Angharad and the other women.

Furiosa of the Swaddle Dog Clan was thirteen years old when she heard the distant rumble of the engines, deeper and larger than the buzz of the dirtbikes that she was used to. The Vuvalini did not have such vehicles, such massive monster engines with wide jaws and gleaming armour. They had seeds and bikes and clean dirt. They had a few guns and bullets to keep the buzzards away, nothing like the machine guns, the harpoons, and the thundersticks mounted on the trucks.

It was after the harvest and the village had reaped all the crops for the harsh approaching winter. They had filled their stores with wheat, corn, gourds, and dried fruit. With little else to do, Furiosa had spent the day hunting crows with her friend, Valkyrie, a slender whip of a girl with a smile like a wolf. They didn’t waste bullets on the birds, but struck them down with slingshots. Valkyrie had better aim, and both her arms, and she caught two, but Furiosa caught the biggest of the day, and proudly brought it home to her mother.

Mary Jo Bassa smiled down after her daughter, accepting the limp bird from her. Furiosa began plucking its shiny black feathers, planning to make a new necklace or headpiece with them, while her mother built the fire outside to cook it. Their house was small and windowless, made of sheet metal, wood, and scavenged leather, and a fire would quickly overwhelm it with smoke if they ever cooked indoors.

“Is that thunder?” Furiosa asked, hearing a faint sound.

Her mother paused, listening and frowning. It was far too steady to be thunder, which roars and lulls. The only change in the sound was it slowly growing louder and more like a growl with each passing second.

“Buzzards,” hissed Mary, grabbing a pistol from inside. She walked up toward a hill that looked out over the western flatlands, telling Furiosa to stay behind. Furiosa didn’t listen and followed her, expecting to see one of the spiked buzzard vehicles approaching.

There were four of them, all kicking up a trail of dust in their wake, and each one a beast. They rode on huge tires and held out rippling red and black flags, not the buzzards, but something unknown and even more threatening. From inside, men shrieked and whooped. Mary Jo Bassa shouted for Furiosa to run, to hide, anything to get away, but Furiosa was frozen, paralyzed before these great predators. She barely remembered being taken. They must have grabbed her and put her in the backseat of one of the cars next to her mother. She couldn’t remember if she fought or came willingly, though the pain in her lip told her it was likely the former. Mary Jo Bassa, too, sported an eye that was purple and swollen shut. Her gun was gone. They clung to each other as the cars drove away, praying that K.T. Concannon or Nykae Sawgrass would lead a daring rescue, but they knew their dirt bikes could never take on these monsters.

The citadel was the largest and ugliest thing that Furiosa had ever seen. It loomed, brown and hard, over their heads, barren but for a small topping of green. It was made up of three rock formations; the one on the left had a huge carved skull about halfway up. Just below the skull, a huge stream of water poured out of the rock, bigger than any of the creeks that ran through the Green Place. Below was a crowd of people, more than she had ever seen in one place and a booming voice echoing out from the rock. The water only ran for a few seconds, and then stopped, first to a trickle and then nothing.

They drove to the rock across from the waterfall, drove straight onto a piece of metal that lifted them upwards to dizzying heights, until they reached a hole in the rock to drive into the mountain and be swallowed by it.

Mary Jo Bassa lasted three days in the citadel. She and Furiosa were put to work in the steaming belly of the mountain, where the parts for the monstrous cars and weapons were built. They worked sixteen hour days, covered in sweat, never seeing the sun, and sleeping on mats in a room full of the other worker women. Sometimes the warboys would come to visit the women, and Mary Jo Bassa would turn Furiosa toward the wall so that she could not see. On the third day, no longer able to stand it, Mary Jo Bassa had tried to stop one of the men and was killed on the spot.

Furiosa grew up alone in citadel, surrounded by warboys and slaves, hearing the booming voice of the Immortan on the loudspeaker. When she was fifteen, a mechanic selected her to help put together a V8 engine. He was a tough boss, but he never touched her and he sometimes snuck her extra bread, claiming that she was far too scrawny. He moved her higher into the citadel, gave her a room shared with only three other workers, and taught her how to drive.

When she was sixteen, she drove the mechanic and a small patrol of warboys out on a scavenging mission. Furiosa stayed behind in the car with one of the warboys, while the mechanic and the others picked through the site. As the others got farther from their sight, the warboy pulled Furiosa out of the car and tried to rape her. When the others returned, she was covered in blood that was not her own and the warboy was dead in the sand, missing a few crucial pieces of himself. The mechanic laughed and patted her on the shoulder. None of the warboys touched her after that, saying that she had teeth in her vagina.

When she was eighteen, she drove a party of warboys to Gastown to pick up guzzolene. They were attacked by the buzzards and two of the trucks were lost, all except the one driven by Furiosa. She was brought to meet the Immortan, himself, for such an act of skill and courage. Furiosa quaked inside to meet the man behind the booming voice, though she would never deign to show any sign of fear or hesitation. She marched up to him as if he were any other warboy or mechanic, just another man of little to no interest to her. He was interesting, though. Ugly, cruel, and horrifying, yes, but also interesting. He was dressed for war with a rigid breastplate, covered in medals, a metal skull codpiece, and white painted skin like the warboys. He wore a breathing mask lined with horse teeth, made to look intimidating, but truly just a sign that his body was weakening just like the bodies of the wretched horde that lived below the citadel. His hair was black, beginning to grow grey at the roots, and the skin of his elbows grew bubbled and blistered. He was nothing like the gods of the Vuvalini. In person, his voice was softer than the echoing and eerie voice from the speaker, but raspy and grating as a frog’s croak. The Immortan could not make Furiosa one of his wives, as she was born imperfect, with her stunted arm, but he offered her other honored positions: the wife of an Imperator, a milk mother with a life of ease, a gardener. Furiosa asked to be a warboy and Joe laughed so hard he fell into a fit of coughing. Furiosa stood still and unwavering. She asked again.

When she was nineteen, Furiosa became the first female warboy. Building cars had made her strong, in spite of her rather small frame. The warboys were all skinny, though, to be honest. Food could be hard to come by, and Rictus Erectus, the Immortan’s son, was the only warrior who could be truly be considered hefty, even as a young man. It was Furiosa’s skill in driving, however, that truly made her excel. Most warboys began as lancers and gunmen and worked their way up to driver, but Furiosa was given a steering wheel on her first day. Her car was called Red Teeth, made from the body of a Chevrolet Chevelle on jacked-up wheels and painted to look like the gaping mouth of a boar’s head. She had two lancers, Wrench and Smiley, both of whom died before she turned twenty four.

When she was twenty seven, she could out-shoot almost any warboy with both pistols and rifles. She outlived most of them. The average warboy graduated from a pup in their late teens and died in their mid-twenties. They were fearless and keen in a way that Furiosa was not, but she bested them in skill and strategy.

When she was twenty nine, she became an Imperator. Some of the buzzard clans had united to form a coalition. They stormed the citadel, thirty cars strong and each spiked like a metal porcupine. One of the Imperators suggested they stay safely secluded in the citadel until the buzzards lost their patience and retreated. He was immediately thrown from the citadel for his cowardice. Furiosa was one of the first to volunteer to dispatch the buzzards. Her car was destroyed in the ensuing battle, but her actions became legend, reaching so far as Gastown. Stories spread of how she single-handedly destroyed three buzzard cars and one of their claw trucks, how she cut the head off the buzzard leader herself and mounted it on a broken spear, and how she walked back to the Citadel, car-less but victorious. The Immortan gave her the war rig to drive to replace Red Teeth.

And when she was thirty three, she met the wives.


End file.
